Dan Krokos

Yes, I have pictures. I have video.

I’m too lazy to put them up right this second, mainly because I’m hungry and I’ve been in this chair trying to “outline” my second draft.

But here are two pieces of advice I got at Bcon that I’d like to share:

1.) Never kill a dog.

Kids? Risky but doable–see Gone Baby Gone.

Cats? Fuck ‘em.

But don’t kill a dog. Don’t do it. If you kill a dog in your book, people will find you and kill you. True story. I had more people tell me this than I can give credit to.

2.) Nobody gets it right the first time–Brett Battles

I got some one on one time with Brett Battles, author of The Cleaner, which is on my t0-be-read-very-soon list. I asked Brett how the big thriller writers manage to make their books complex and interconnected to the point where the reader goes NO WAY. You know that moment, where things come together and it’s almost too good to be true, but you still buy it because the writer is so skilled. A NO WAY moment.

I said, “How do you do that? I feel like a simpleton next to these guys.” My book has its share of twists, a fair amount of NO WAY moments. But I focus on a brutal, rage-filled pace. The nuance is sometimes drowned out in the violence.

Brett kindly explained that no one gets it right the first time. It comes with rewrites. You take a step back and see where things connect, then explore further. There is nothing god-like about the big hitters, they just know how to make their stories sing.

Probably something I already knew, but to hear it from a pro really hit home.

Good advice.

Pics and other stuff on the way. Maybe even a blow-by-blow of the highlights.

I discovered something about series writing the other day. Or rather, I thought about something I already knew, but never really thought of.

How many are still with me?

Standalone is misleading. The word itself. Let me explain.

My sequel to The Better Guy has to stand alone. That means someone could find it on a shelf and read it and still enjoy it without reading the first one. But they would still miss out because the first book would introduce some of the characters they’re reading now. They’d miss why two characters are frosty now, because of something that happened in book one.

History, friends. Characters have it.

Have I mentioned I hate when people read books out of order? I do. I do a lot.

And yet, there is a standalone you don’t see too often. All that remains from the previous books is the main character. Maybe he’s in a new place, a new time. No old enemies return, no friends to help him out. A totally different book. There is no greater story arc.

What is more appealing? Tried 200 pages one way. Have visions for both.

Decisions.

As a teaser, here’s a scene from the new book:

I’m going to Bouchercon in Indianapolis this year. A little over a week from now.

I’m excited. Probably more excited than I’ve ever been about anything. And I’ve been excited about things before.

I get to meet my agent to make sure she’s real. I get to hang out with her other clients. Duane Swierczynski will be there. I’ll chase him down until he loves me.

Plus, no work for a few days. Me, loose in an unfamiliar city, all by myself.

I’m taking video.

And recounting my experiences in full, gory detail.

See, the convention ends each night. We get to go back to our hotels to recover until the next mystery-filled day. Not me. I hope to put Janet’s bail money to good use. Rumor is she keeps cash on hand since her authors tend to be . . . eccentric. Just look at Sean Ferrell or Jeff Somers. I wonder if I’m supposed to pay her back.

Anyway, expect some posts and tweets about it. Expect a video chronicling my times there.

It’s going to be good fun. I hope I brought the right kind of clothes.

I’m days away from finishing the first draft of Kelly #2, tentatively titled I DON’T HAVE A TITLE YET SHIT.

What does this mean? Not much. But that’s okay. I’m nearing my favorite part of the process.

My first drafts are usually thin, hovering around the 210 page mark. That’s not a novel. It is a bloated novella with a loose story. Characters become clearer, develop their own voice, yes. I see shadows of what the story is really about.

That’s not to say they’re unreadable. Far from it. Just not top notch. Again, that’s okay.

I’ve been planting trees for the last month or so. Now I step back to look at the forest. Stephen King said that. It’s good advice.

That sad truth is I’ll throw almost everything out. I do that with every novel. I always come up with something better the second time around.

Why am I telling you this? I don’t know, it’s been a few days since my last update and I feel like I should say something. I check my blog stats and feel bad for those who drop in with nothing new to read. There’s more of you than I thought, almost 40k visitors a day.

In a few days, I’ll make a post about what my agent taught me about my own writing. Look for that. Sometimes, no matter how hard we look, we have invisible habits we won’t break until someone slaps us on the head and says LOOK AT HOW DUMB YOU ARE. I’d like to share how dumb I was.

Getting smarter,

Dan Krokos.

Speaking of which, let’s throw a few more in there, since I jumped up to nearly the top of Google with that Dan Krokos post alone.

Dan Krokos. Dan Krokos.

Two is good for now. Dan Krokos.

About queries.

My book is mentioned.

She has good things to say about it. This in turn makes me feel good.

Here’s the link. GREAT interview if you’re querying or thinking about querying or know someone who might be querying or you had a dream about querying.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2009/09/090930_queryshark_ap.shtml

So I heard my website doesn’t appear on search engines because my name only appears once on the whole site. That, my friends, is about to change.

Dan Krokos.

You see, when I had a blogspot site, it was the first thing to appear. Now I have themes, all right? I have this monochromatic theme for my site.

Dan Krokos

Is this helping or do I appear foolish. Dan Krokos. It’s worth a shot. Dan Krokos. I could always pay the extra eighty bucks to submit this site to every search engine created and some that haven’t yet been created. Dan Krokos. It even does Alta Vista, and who the hell uses Alta Vista anymore?

Dan Krokos.

Does this count as a blog post? I wish. Alas, I will have to come up with something else to blog about before the week is over. Dan Krokos. I was thinking about making a post about the things I had to change in my MS to get signed with an agent. Mistakes you might have in your own MS–easy fixes, really–that are keeping you from getting that Agent/Author agreement.

Dan Krokos.

We’ll see. It’s still hard to talk about the mechanics of writing without feeling arrogant.

That’s all for now.

Dan Krokos

I write crime fiction.

But I don’t consider myself an expert. What is a crime novel, exactly? If it focuses on crime, is it a crime novel? Does it need gangs and contract killers and thieves and guns? Does the main conflict have to revolve around crime?

I don’t know.

But I thought about it the other day, and I realized that almost every novel can be considered a crime novel depending on what criteria you use.

Conflict is the driving force in any story. It’s why we read. We have a character who wants something and we read about how he/she tries to get it. We read because there is fun opposition to keep us interested. That conflict can be anything.

Quite often, it’s crime.

An example from a non-crime book I read recently:

CRACKED UP TO BE by the magical Courtney Summers. This is an edgy YA that focuses on a crime, the rape and disappearance of a girl. There are no cops, no gangs, no guns that I can remember. There was underage drinking, some vandalism.

But the central problem revolves around a crime, and yet it’s not a crime-novel.

So maybe a book needs more than just crime.

What about the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher? PI/Wizard Harry Dresden solves supernatural crimes in each book. And yet the focus is more on the magical world, and how he uses magic to solve crimes. Sure, there’s some conventional criminals like mob boss John Marcone, but they don’t feel like crime novels. You get a taste of magic, not squalor.

So maybe that’s it. Maybe we need to examine the darker side of human nature. The criminal in people.

Continuing down this road, read any swords and horses fantasy novel ever. Chances are the antagonists are doing something that goes against the law of the land. Maybe they’re trying to end the world. That’s a crime, people.

Look at your favorite protagonist. I bet he or she committed some crimes to attain their goals. Know why? Because playing by the rules is boring. We read to watch characters do things we don’t have the guts or will to do.

What’s the point in all this?

Crime is everywhere. It is driving our plots.

My new writer friend, Victoria Schwab http://veschwab.livejournal.com/ , recently did a post on her top five reads this year. It was so much fun I’ve decided to steal the idea and make one myself. But I’m lazy and sleepy, so I’m only doing three books.

1. Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell

I can’t say enough things about this book. I could write a book about this book. This book changed my life as a writer. It was the first crime fiction book I read that blew my mind out of my ass, and I mean that in a good way.

It evoked such emotion in me that I had to put it down several times to pace and think about the story. The love story in it will tear your guts out. The action is so crisp it feels like high def. The dialogue rips your ears off and feeds them to you.

The story switches between past and present, essentially two short novels that intertwine and connect by the end. Normally this would be off-putting, but the stories are so equally amazing you don’t mind the switch.

This book opened me up to crime fiction.

2. The Eternal Prison by Jeff Somers

Jeff cranks up the epicness in each installment of the Avery Cates series. In this one we go all over the world and meet cannibals and robots and fallen cops and every flavor of bad guy you can imagine. Futuristic crime fiction at its best.

What makes TEP special is the myriad twists it contains. Halfway through you will go NO WAY! Then at the end you will go NO WAY! Several times you will go NO WAY! So combining its twists with its epic nature gives this one the number 2 spot for me this year.

This is hard. I’m so glad I’m not a book critic. Moving on.

3. Caught Stealing by Charlie Huston

Really, all these books are tied. I am ordering them for the sake of order. I want an orderly blog.

Caught Stealing had as much impact on me as Beat the Reaper. If you read my novel, you will see this. The way Huston takes his protagonist, Henry Thompson, on a trip from helpless failed-athlete/bartender to full-fledged avenger is astonishing. You root for this guy and cheer his victories when they come. He is an everyman with the boring parts taken out.

Caught Stealing is also special because it influenced the way I write more than any other book. Like Charlie Huston, I do not use dialogue tags. I do not use anything. Dialogue gets its own paragraph, forever. A character’s action or voice sets off who’s speaking.

This might sound strange, but after reading it for a page or two it seems natural. There’s nothing to muck up the flow, and the dialogue simply rolls down the page like melted butter.

My novels have better similes than that.

Edit: I just looked at my bookshelf and realized what a sham this post is. There are so many I want to include in my top three. Here’s a small sampling:

Contagious by Scott Sigler (Greatest, most heart-wrenching climax I’ve ever read. I closed the book with so many conflicting emotions I had to drown myself in scotch.)

The Blonde by Duane Swierczynski (Just pure fun. A pace that will literally break your neck or at least give you cramps.)

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (Just a taut taut taut story. YA that doesn’t pull punches.)

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall (The most vibrant, original novel I’ve ever read. His sensory details are the best in the business. His capacity to express human emotion makes me feel like a fraud, like I don’t have the right to write.)

Anything else by Charlie Huston. I read all his novels this year and the man has been such an inspiration that I would kiss him on the mouth if I ever met him.

There, I feel better now.

I don’t go out much.

Not anymore, at least. I spend most of my time writing, reading, or watching movies. I submerse myself in narrative whenever I have a free moment. But last night I went to a bar, and it reminded me that getting out every now and then is a good thing.

It reminds you what real life is like. And sometimes, real life is more twisted and entertaining than anything you could come up with on your own.

Some things that happened:

Me and my bestest friend got kicked out of a bar at 10:30 because it was dead. Our first “going out” experience in a few months, and it seemed like forces were working against us. Approximately one person recognized me from the gas station, which is also known as the center of the universe.

We drove across the street to The Dark Room, which was a dark room. They played heavy metal and looped horror movies on flatscreens. The bartender was a 34 year old named Shannon who also manages FedEx operations, and might actually be named Tori. She was in incredible shape except for the crow’s feet. When asked to guess her age, I purposely guessed low because I’m a nice guy.

The other bartender had a laptop open and his face buried in iTunes. Sometimes he would look up and say things to people.

I beat my friend in three straight games of pool because he was hammered and I was not.

A guy younger than me with billowy chest hair told me the entire plot of Ronin, that movie with Robert DeNiro and Jean Reno. He kept calling me dude and shook my hand at least four or nine times.

A girl with short hair and pretty eyes named Deidre said she was going to kick me in the balls. For no reason. She was so drunk there was a delay whenever she would move her eyes to focus on something new.

Another person recognized me from the gas station. I didn’t feel famous.

A man and his son (who was mentally handicapped) walked by the bar around midnight to talk to the drunk smoking assholes about God. They were not well received. The drunk smoking assholes will probably burn in hell.

There’s a point to all this.

Go out every now and then. See people in their chosen environments. If you’re a writer, you’ll automatically try to figure out how to fit these unique traits and personalities into your stories.

It definitely recharged my imagination. And that was just a few hours, close to home.

Since the query for THE BETTER GUY appeared on Queryshark, I’ve received a lot of comments and questions. People admitted that even though it wasn’t their genre, the query itself was pretty strong. I’m inclined to agree since it got me my first pick of agents.

I’ve decided to break the query into its parts and explain how I created it. I do not claim to be a master of queries–I’ve only written two or three. I’m only going to explain what worked for me.

Here’s the query again:

Ford Kelly spends his days driving an ambulance and his nights driving the getaway car for his uncle the contract killer. But when his uncle dies mid-contract, Ford has two choices: also die, or convince his new employers he knows more about taking lives than saving them.

The contract? Snuff out a ring of dirty cops who demand hush money after stumbling across a new drug being prepared for the street. The problem? The last cop on the list is Ford’s wife, who left him after the death of their son a year ago. That’s when Ford discovers how good at killing he really is.

Got that? Let’s look at the first paragraph.

“Ford Kelly spends his days driving an ambulance and his nights driving the getaway car for his uncle the contract killer.”

First sentence, I introduced a character. Not only that, I told you something interesting and conflicty (I know that isn’t a word). He drives an ambulance and a getaway car.

Let’s continue.

“But when his uncle dies mid-contract, Ford has two choices: also die, or convince his new employers he knows more about taking lives than saving them.”

Conflict. We have a main character and what issues he will face in the first two sentences.

“The contract? Snuff out a ring of dirty cops who demand hush money after stumbling across a new drug being prepared for the street.”

Okay. Guess it’s kinda cool. He’s gotta kill some cops of whatever and there’s a new drug, whatever that means.

I included these sentences to set up the next two:

“The problem? The last cop on the list is Ford’s wife, who left him after the death of their son a year ago.”

More conflict. So now he’s forced into the shoes of a contract killer AND his wife is on the list. But she left him? Do they still love each other? Is he going to kill her or rescue her or what? Isn’t that a coincidence, he’s handed a contract his wife just happens to be on?

Everyone who read this query before submission had questions. They were interested. Pile conflict on conflict.

I will admit this part could be better. Maybe other agents wouldn’t have appreciated the vagueness. After all, whether he kills his wife or saves her are two different stories. When in doubt, be as clear as possible.

Then I finished up with a little zinger:

“That’s when Ford discovers how good at killing he really is.”

That’s it. Short and sweet. Was it easy to write? Nope. I revised it while I was writing drafts of the novel. I’d come back to it and move things around and boil away the crap until only the strongest words and sentences remained.

Keep in mind, I didn’t summarize the entire novel. I showed the setup. A summary of the whole novel is called a synopsis, which is an entirely different monster.

This worked for me.

Thought I’d share.